Our mission at Hostarium is to provide fast, effective web hosting solutions in the most jargon-free, open way possible.

For example, we don’t think you should be caught out by being told to upgrade if your site becomes slow (with no data to backup the advice), nor do we think it is fair to tie you into long contracts unnecessarily.

We do however need to cover some standard terms and conditions to explain certain operational items that we or our suppliers are bound by.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact us for plain-English clarification.

This agreement is made between Hostarium Limited, a limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 11757223 (“Hostarium”), and you the Customer.

When registering an account or signing up for a service with Hostarium, you agree to the below items.

Billing and Charges

Hostarium has established a reputation for reliability, performance, support and value for money. At Hostarium we work hard to provide you with the best possible service and we’re so confident in this that we offer a no-quibble, 60 day money back guarantee. If you are unhappy for any reason within the first 60 days of opening your shared hosting account, you are free to cancel and receive a full refund including the time already used, less domain registration fees which are non-refundable.

We would however appreciate it if you got in touch with us before deciding to cancel so that we can address any problems you might be having.

Payments
We create renewal invoices 30 days in advance and send them to your registered e-mail address. You must ensure this e-mail address is kept up to date and can receive emails from us. We recommend adding support@hostarium.com to your contacts and ‘safe sender’ lists.

It is important that we receive payment on time. If a hosting account becomes overdue we allow a 3 day grace period before suspending access.

Please note that domain name registrations expire on the day immediately after their renewal date. Domain names often have a 30 day grace period during which they can be renewed at no additional charge (over the standard renewal price), however this varies per extension.

Once a hosting account is suspended we will retain backups for 30 additional days. After this point your data may be irreversibly deleted. Please contact us if you need a payment extension and we will do our utmost to accommodate.

We operate rolling 30 day contracts but we guarantee there will be no price increases for 5 years from your hosting account purchase date, except for any changes in government taxation or domain name registry fees. We will notify you of any alteration by providing you with a written notice to your e-mail address.

You warrant that you are lawfully authorised to make payment using the payment card or facility you disclose to us. In the event where you are not the named cardholder, you acknowledge that you and the named cardholder both accept these terms and conditions and are jointly and severally liable for any payment(s) due. You hereby indemnify us in the event that the cardholder or issuer declines any transaction for payment, including our costs in recovering the outstanding amount due.

If you attempt a chargeback or dispute a transaction with your bank, we reserve the right to suspend all services provided to you with immediate effect.

Our services are intended to be used for the purposes of hosting websites and e-mail, and related services. Batch processing, video encoding/transcoding, web crawling/spidering, archiving and online backup systems are not permitted on our hosting servers. We will always do our best to accommodate any requests.

Cancellation and refunds

In the event of cancellation we will refund un-used months to your account credit balance. If you wish to cancel a service please login to our billing area and request cancellation at least 72 hours in advance. If using direct debit please provide us as much notice as possible in order to cancel the instruction between our banks. In the event an unwanted payment is taken after you have notified us of cancellation, and received confirmation from us, we will refund the errant payment back to you in full.

Any disputes must be expressed in writing via our ticket system.

Termination
We hope to have a long and positive relationship with all our clients. But we know that our products will not always be correct for you. Should we feel that your needs would be better served by another provider we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to terminate the hosting agreement. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will provide 30 days notice of termination and provide a backup of all website content and email and assist with your migration.

Termination of this agreement does not affect your pre-existing liability, if any or affect our right to recover damages or pursue any other remedy in respect of any breach of this agreement by you.

If you breach these Terms and cause us to terminate your hosting agreement, we will be entitled to recover any outstanding payments which would have been due up to the time of termination. This is to protect us against fraud and abuse.

Domain registration, renewal, transfer and restoration

We will always register, transfer and renew domain names in your name. You are always in control of your domain name(s) and can manage your nameservers, lock status and WHOIS data through My.Hostarium.com. It is your responsibility to keep this data correct. We will pass on to you any complaints received by the Registry and request that you assist us with resolving the issue within 24 hours or one working day, whichever is sooner.

All domain registrations are bound by the Registrant Agreement of the particular registry which controls that domain name space. For example, to learn about .uk domain name policies please visit Nominet.org.uk.

Account Support
All our packages include access to our unlimited, friendly support team. We do not bill per incident or per time spent with you. We do ask that you understand that we are not a web design or agency support team, however we will recommend agencies to assist you should we feel your request is outside the scope of our hosting environment support.

It is very rare for us to be unable to help, and this clause is only designed to help ensure all relevant teams can assign responsibility to keep your website(s) operating as required.

We provide support via e-mail and phone. To provide efficient service and comply with data protection laws, any requests for changes to your account must be submitted by ticket or e-mail from your registered address.

Our live chat feature and Slack channels serve as informal channels for discussion or quick advice.

Acceptable Usage Policy

You are responsible for all data stored under your account, and for the behaviour of any scripts uploaded to your account. Should we notice unusual activity we will investigate and contact you, and take any necessary action to protect your website and the rest of our environment. This can include temporary suspension of access to your account if required by our service provider.

You must not use the service for the transmission of illegal material. You agree to refrain from sending or receiving any materials which may be deemed to be offensive, abusive, indecent, defamatory, obscene, menacing or otherwise as prohibited by current and future statutes in force. You agree to refrain from sending or receiving any material which may be in breach of copyright (including Intellectual Property Rights), confidence, privacy or other rights. If you are in any doubt as to the legality of what you are doing, or propose to do, you should take independent legal advice.

Furthermore:

– You must not gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any computer systems for any purpose. Such action may lead to criminal prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act.
– You must not send data to the internet using forged addresses or data which is deliberately designed to adversely affect remote machines (including but not limited to denial of service (DDoS), worms and viruses, trojans and ping storms).
– You must ensure that local PCs and network connected servers are not configured to allow open relay and must not participate in the sending of unsolicited bulk email (commonly referred to as ‘spam’ ,’UBE’,’UCE’ ).
– You are prohibited from running ‘port scanning’ or other software intended to probe, scan, test the vulnerability of or access remote systems or networks except in circumstances where the remote user has given express permission for this to be done. We may ask for evidence of such permission.
– You must take all reasonable steps to ensure that your password and login credentials remain confidential.
– Open proxy servers are not permitted under any circumstances and will result in immediate termination of service.
– Sites must not contain ‘hateful’ material or content which seeks to incite hate.
– Adult content is allowed however websites must not contain images, videos, depictions or descriptions of pornography which are unlawful in the UK or within the jurisdiction of your selected hosting location.
– Sites must not contain ‘warez’, copyrighted music/videos or links to such content. It is your sole responsibility to ensure that they have the rights to distribute any content displayed on their website.
– Sites must conform to UK copyright law.

We are a UK company and data stored by us outside the USA is not subject to any USA laws or restrictions. However if you do store data within a USA location, you agree to be bound by any state and federal laws which may apply, and with which we will have to co-operate.

We undertake to take action required under the provisions of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and will fully cooperate with the appropriate UK authorities.

Acceptable Email Usage

We have a zero-tolerance policy against spam and the sending of bulk, unsolicited e-mail is prohibited at all times. Customers who abuse the email service will be notified that their behaviour is unacceptable and may have their accounts suspended, terminated or blocked at our sole discretion.

– You agree not to send emails that might cause annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety to a recipient.
– You agree not to send any emails likely to cause distress or any material which is offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing or in any way unlawful.
– You agree to have a clear opt out policy in all newsletter communications.
– You must not use our mail services or network to send email to any user who does not wish to receive it.
– You must not use our mail services or network to send unsolicited email, in bulk (commonly known as ‘spam’) or individually.
– You must not use our mail services or network with intent to deprive others of service (‘mail bomb’).
– You must not use false mail headers or alter the headers of mail messages in such a way as to conceal the identity of the sender.
– You must not use any email address that you are not authorised to use.

Service Level Agreement

We guarantee to provide a 99.9% service uptime, excluding planned or emergency server maintenance or conditions beyond our reasonable control. All customers will be notified of planned maintenance as far as possible in advance through our status page.

Should we break this SLA in any calendar month with unscheduled service unavailability we will upon request credit a full month’s cost to your client account.

Our SLA is rescinded if you have overdue invoices on your account.

We will always take every reasonable measure to ensure the stability of our platform however Hostarium makes no guarantee to defend a customer’s website from a denial of service attack. We work with numerous third party specialists and highly recommend Cloudflare.com – please contact us with any questions or concerns.

In the event of a problem with your website infrastructure, we shall ensure that a qualified engineer will be dealing with the problem within 15 minutes of being notified. When notifying you we will update our status page with the details of the problem along with an estimation of when the issue will be resolved.

We provide our packages on the basis of number of unique visitors per month. If we discover abnormal usage such as a very high level of file downloads or a very large number of small requests, we will investigate and contact you, and may temporarily disable access to your website to ensure the activity is legitimate. These events are not covered by our SLA. However such occurrences are extremely rare and would only be undertaken to protect our platform stability and ensure your website was not suffering any unexpected malign activity.

Disclaimer, Limitation of Liability and Copyright

We are unable to assert fitness for any specific purpose and as such the Company cannot be held liable for any form of consequential loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by use of our service, misuse of our service, downtime, service issues, data loss or any other event.

Our maximum aggregate liability to you under or in connection with this agreement in respect of any direct loss, whether such claim arises in contract or in tort shall not exceed a sum equal to twice the fees paid by you for the services in relation to which your claim arises during the 3 month period prior to such claim.

None of the clauses herein shall apply so as to restrict liability for death or personal injury resulting from our negligence, the negligence of our employees or our sub-contractors. We will not be liable for any interruptions to services arising directly or indirectly from:

– Interruptions to the flow of data to or from the internet
– The effects of the failure or interruption of services provided by a third party
– Factors outside our reasonable control
– Your actions or omissions
– Problems with your equipment and/or third party equipment
– No action or proceedings against us arising out of or in connection with this agreement shall be commenced more than one year after services rendered, and both parties acknowledge that this clause constitutes an express waiver of any rights under any otherwise applicable statute of limitations.

In the event of any preventable disruption to service we will credit your account as described in our Service Level Agreement. Our liability will not exceed the total amount paid for the service. If you have sensitive or mission-critical data to host, you must seek your own insurance, independent legal advice and business continuity strategies.

Our backups are intended as a convenience service and are not guaranteed or intended to replace your backup procedures. Nor can we be held liable if you are unable to reach our network due to issues with your systems or the wider internet, or in cases where a recognised authority has asked us to block access. It is your sole responsibility to ensure you have a local backup of all your important data as part of your own business continuity processes.

Some of the services we provide are fulfilled by a third party provider. For instance, an SSL certificate is provided by a root certificate provider (e.g. Let’s Encypt), and domain names are provided by the organisation in charge of that namespace (e.g. Nominet or Verisign). Whilst we always pass your orders on to these third party entities in a timely fashion, we unfortunately cannot be held liable for any failings on their behalf.

All third party software and hardware shall be sold subject to your acceptance of the relevant supplier’s software licence for such third party software. Where possible, we shall forward to you any and all representations and warranties we receive from the respective third party software supplier.

**Force Majeure**
We will not be responsible for any failure to provide any services or perform any obligation because of any act of God, strike, lock-outs or other industrial disputes.

**Notice**
Any notice or communications required or permitted to be delivered by us to you shall be deemed to have been given if delivered by e mail in accordance with the contact information that you have provided.

**Assignment**
You shall not assign, transfer, charge or deal in any other manner with this Agreement or any of its rights under it nor purport to do the same without our prior written consent.

We may at any time, assign (absolutely or by way of security and in whole or in part), transfer, mortgage, charge or deal in any other manner with the benefit of any or all of any other party’s obligations or any benefit arising under this agreement.

Amendment in Writing
We may update or amend these terms and conditions from time time to comply with law or to meet our changing business requirements.

Whole Agreement
This agreement, and any documents referred to in it, constitute the whole agreement between the parties and supersede any previous arrangement, understanding or agreement between them relating to the subject matter they cover.

Nothing in this clause operates to limit or exclude any liability for fraud.

Severance
If any provision of this agreement (or part of a provision) is found by any court or administrative body of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, unenforceable or illegal, the other provisions shall remain in force.

If any invalid, unenforceable or illegal provision would be valid, enforceable or legal if some part of it were deleted, the provision shall apply with whatever modification is necessary to give effect to the commercial intention of the parties.

Governing law and Jurisdiction
This agreement and any disputes or claims arising out of or in connection with its subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by and construed in accordance with the law of England.

The parties irrevocably agree that the courts of England have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim that arises out of or in connection with this agreement or its subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims).

Communications Forwarding
Communications received with respect to a particular domain name registration will be handled as follows: (i) We will forward to you or a Contact all correspondence received by registered mail or traceable courier. This information may be opened, scanned and emailed to you or your Contact. Regular postal mail will be discarded or returned to sender at our discretion. (ii) Email correspondence will be forwarded, only if submitted via the contactprivacy.com website, to the address as it appears in Tucows or Hexonet GmBH records. (iii) A voice mail message will advise all callers that inbound messages will not be accepted; calls will be directed to the privacy provider web site where written messages will be forwarded according to your instructions. (iv) We will only be responsible for forwarding communications where our details have appeared in the whois and when your Whois Information is accurate, complete and up to date.

Right to Suspend and Disable
We shall have the right, at our sole discretion and without liability to you or any of your Contacts, suspend or cancel your domain name and to reveal Registrant and Contact Whois Information in certain circumstances, including but not limited to the following: (i) when required by law; (ii) in the good faith belief that disclosure is necessary to further determination of an alleged breach of a law; (iii) to comply with a legal process served upon Tucows or Hexonet GmBH; (iv) to resolve any and all third party claims including but not limited to ICANN’s or a Registry’s dispute resolution policy; (v) to avoid financial loss or legal liability (v) to avoid financial loss or legal liability; (vi) if we believe that you or one of your Contacts is using the Whois Privacy Service to conceal involvement with illegal, illicit, objectionable or harmful activities; or (vii) to transmit SPAM, viruses, worms or other harmful computer programs.

You understand and agree that, in the event that we receive a formal complaint, notice of claim or UDRP, that we will have the right to disable the Whois Privacy Service pending final disposition of the matter.

1. Company Address and Contact Details

71-75 Shelton Street, London,WC2H 9JQ

2. How long will you take to get back to me?

Within office hours, near instantly. Outside of office hours we aim to
respond and resolve within 4 hours. Every email gets a response within
12 hours. Anything sent by post will be responded to within 3 working days.

3. Abuse, phishing, spam contact –

All reports will be acknowledged within 3 working days.
complaints@hostarium.com

4. How to raise a Format Complaint

Please email support@hostarium.com and you will normally receive a response within seven business days.

5. Data Quality Policy

It is a requirement that you provide us with a valid name and address when purchasing a service from SpeedyDot. Our online ordering system will not let users order items through without providing a valid name and address, and our merchant provider will check the details (cardholder name and address) against those provided for the registration at the time of ordering. We will validate personal users using billing data (name match the card on file, address digits given match the card given),

In circumstances where we don’t have access to cardholder information where the validity of the data provided is in question we would ask for two copies of ID out of:-
Passport
Driving licence
Recent Utility Bill or bank statement(not for a mobile phone)

For businesses we can validate data using the official companies house register (company name, address). Alternatively, the business can provide a utility bill, bank/merchant statement, or a letter from HMRC dated within the last three months to provide verified proof of name and address.

Verified/validated data will be stored in our online ordering/billing system which is a PCI compliant solution, but the copies of identification used to perform the validation would be destroyed once the validation process has been completed.

If we are unable to contact a registrant where there was a problem with data verification, we would place a data lock on the domain name manually once all attempts to contact the registrant had failed. This will be within 30 days of originally being notified.

6. Renewal policy

Renewal reminders are sent by our automated billing system 60, 30 and 7 days before the renewal date by way of a pro-forma invoice for the domain renewal. Providing you have consented (either during the order form, or subsequently in our panel) the system will attempt to charge the card on file and then renew the domain name automatically on the renewal date. If the automated renewal fails for any reason (card details not correct, insufficient funds) you will receive a notification to let them know to log-in to renew the domain at this time.

3rd Party Domain Terms
Domain names are usually subject to the registration terms and conditions set by the relevant registry as well as the registration terms of Hostarium.

Where possible links to the relevant 3rd party terms and dispute resolution policies are included below, if you have any queries regarding these please raise a support ticket and we’ll be glad to assist where possible.

Nominet – .uk Domain Registration Terms
Terms & Conditions of Domain Name Registration – The contract you enter into with us when you register a .UK domain name.
https://nominet.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Terms-and-Conditions-of-Domain-Name-Registration-24-04-2020-v1.pdf

Rules of Registration – The rules for the registration and use of domain names within the .UK domain and its sub-domains. These rules form part of our terms and conditions and are part of your contract with us as the Registrant of a domain name.
https://nominet.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/22141819/dotUK-Rules-of-Registration.pdf

The End

Thank you for reading our Terms & Conditions. If you have noticed any errors or have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us. We appreciate the page is lengthy.